About Chajusong

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I very much appreciate how Jake realised while talking about the Bee Movie that actually, Antz is the only bug movie that exists, but that he had the restraint to not say anything.
E: oh, I’m an episode behind, this happened in 38.

Both this year and last year, there was a separate english commentary aimed at newcomers (http://www.twitch.tv/dota2ti_newcomer). Did you check that one out?
e: Oh, nvm - they talked about it on the podcast. I thought I had missed an off-hand comment in the first dota section of the cast.

Guitar Hero math!
I couldn't find the exact dimensions online, but the guitar is a rough 3/4 scale replica of a Gibson SG, whose dimensions are available. It's a weird shape, but I came up with about 0.005 m^3 per guitar (which is probably ~20-30% bigger than the actual guitar but I figure that can account for stacking leaving air gaps.)
The top selling Guitar Hero game was GHIII, which sold about 8 million copies. The top selling Rock Band game sold about 4 million units. Let's call it 12 million plastic guitars.
The base of One World Trade Center is 3700 m^2.
If you stacked up 12 million plastics guitars on an area the size of One World Trade Center, the stack would be 16 meters / 52 feet / 5 storeys high.

I'm really, really bummed about Offworld Trading Company. I loved Civ IV, think Soren Johnson is a cool dude, and this game sounds extremely my shit.
But I'm not, ever, under any circumstance, buying something that says "Stardock" on the box, so I'm going to have to pass on it. It's the worst.

Basically every palette swap in the game is some kind of obscure reference like this, it's great.
Ex, Mario's other swaps:
This guy on reddit compiled (made??) a bunch of these images and put them in imgur albums, separated by series.

NES Remix is just my favourite thing, because of things like this, where the game just challenges you to get every single mushroom in the game, one after the other.
This challenge shows exactly how brilliant the game is, not just as a set of Wario Ware-style mini games, but as a thorough exploration of the design of NES games.
Because these challenges are just put back to back this way, you get to see and appreciate exactly how Super Mario Bros. was designed back in the day. Every mushroom basically stands alone as its own mini-challenge, which maybe isn't visible when simply playing through the game, but is made apparent by changing the presentation.
You see how the first few mushroom are obvious and easy to get, but how the game very gradually introduces enemies, obstacles and pits, tricky jumps, and hidden blocks, one at a time, and eventually together.
You see how the game likes to build a vocabulary of challenges and expand on it:
There's a mushroom inside a Hammer Bros structure, then a mushroom inside a hidden block in a Hammer Bros structure, and a mushroom being protected by a Hammer Bros on ground level.
Or when there's a mushroom in an early castle that's protected by a spinning fire arm, which is expanded later on in two divergent ways, once by making the fire arm longer and actually reaching over the block so you can't use it as protection, and once be setting two fire arms one after the other so that you have to time your run.
You see how the different kinds of enemies present in the game change your behaviour when they're guarding a mushroom - a series of Goombas under blocks are dangerous because the blocks disrupt your jumping, but Piranha Plants and Bullet Bills and Koopa shells all present their own unique challenge.
The grading scheme NES Remix has builds on top of this: you can simply complete the challenges naively, but you'll probably only get two stars. To get a perfect grade, you have to really master the snippet of game presented to you: in this video, it's things like switch a mushroom's direction by hitting a block instead of jumping up and chasing after it, or running under jumping Parakoopas instead of waiting for them to pass.
So just in this one level, you get presented with nearly the entire set of challenges SMB has, and you need to master advanced techniques you wouldn't even need to beat the game in order to get a perfect score.
The people who make this game have a fantastic eye for this kind of thing, and they repeat it game after game. Games get recontexualised by grouping challenges by mechanic, by challenges that challenge your assumptions about the game [there's one challenge, again in SMB, that has you speedrun world 1-2, where you learn that the top of the screen shortcut is actually slower than running through the bottom normal part of the level, because the top shortcut only gets you two stars], or by having you run through touchstones of a game very rapidly [Zelda 1 has a series of challenges which mash two or three dungeons together in a Find the Dungeon Entrance/Get the item/Beat the Boss/Find the Dungeon Entrance/Get the item/Beat the Boss pattern], and I found when playing that I was just as likely to be thrilled at myself for beating a hard challenge that I was for realising something about why a certain level or mechanic worked the way it did or was designed the way it was.
I love NES Remix. It's probably my goty.